Hello beautiful people
I'm gonna write about the most fundamental filter we see the world through, the operating system that helps us use our minds. It's important because it can mislead you to interpretations far from truth.
In the beginning I've got to confess, as a seeker I'm affected by the masters I ran into but most of all you can find Alan Watts in my words. He was a British philosopher, writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularizing Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. In the first part of his lecture series "out of your mind" he explored the nature of Consciousness and this post is what I could grasp from it.
The thing is that we think in the frame of our language and although languages made it possible for us to communicate and talk about the tangible world , they're not compatible with the idea of a world of singularity. words (as language blocks) are actually intellectual boxes and as you know every box differs what's inside and what's outside. So when we start thinking logically we are on a platform of conflicts. we don't have a word for what is everything because in order to understand what it is we have to understand what it isn't. in other word, there is no box with only inside and no outside. For this reason it's almost impossible to say what the world really is. This is where metaphor can be useful. Remember, as human race, we're dedicated to making impossible possible.
Alan Watts explains that our society is under the influence of two basic worldviews. He calls them myth. "A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. " These two models of the universe are "the ceramic model" and the fully automatic model.
According to the ceramic model , the universe is an artifact. It is made, as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it. Clay by itself has no intelligence; it's just stuff, and the potter imposes his will on it, and makes it become whatever he wants. This is the basic picture of the world in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
In the 18th century western intellectuals began to suspect whether there is an architect of the universe, and they reasoned, that you don't have to suppose that there is. By saying 'Everything is governed by God,' you make no difference to your prediction of what's going to happen.
So they got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law. If you study the past and describe how things have behaved, and you've got some regularities in the behavior of the universe, you call that law. And so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is, to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists, blind energy.
Anything you encounter , you will interpret it according to one of these ideas. Your whole reality can change when you use a different explanation.
The alternative to these Ideas we can find in the east. Alan Watts uses the term Dramatic Image. According to this image, world is a drama and the opposites are actually different poles of the same magnet. everything is basically one energy forming shapes and shadows. And the basic duality of form and matter, clay and soul is not real, it's just a deception of the mind trying to comprehend the world we live in.
There's a lot about this in the lecture series you can find here